Read Online The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie - Free Book Online

them. But there were actually only four or five. They were skinny, darkened by sun, their hair long and wild. None of them looked like they had showered for a week.
    Their smell made me jealous.
    They were off to cause trouble somewhere, I’m sure. Little warriors looking for honor in some twentieth-century vandalism. Throw a few rocks through windows, kick a dog, slash a tire. Run like hell when the tribal cops drove slowly by the scene of the crime.
    “Hey,” Adrian asked. “Isn’t that the Windmaker boy?”
    “Yeah,” I said and watched Adrian lean forward to study Julius Windmaker, the best basketball player on the reservation, even though he was only fifteen years old.
    “He looks good,” Adrian said.
    “Yeah, he must not be drinking.”
    “Yet.”
    “Yeah, yet.”
    Julius Windmaker was the latest in a long line of reservation basketball heroes, going all the way back to Aristotle Polatkin, who was shooting jumpshots exactly one year before James Naismith supposedly invented basketball.
    I’d only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man. One time, when the tribal school traveled to Spokane to play this white high school team, Julius scored sixty-seven points and the Indians won by forty.
    “I didn’t know they’d be riding horses,” I heard the coach of the white team say when I was leaving.
    I mean, Julius was an artist, moody. A couple times he walked right off the court during the middle of a game because there wasn’t enough competition. That’s how he was. Julius could throw a crazy pass, surprise us all, and send it out of bounds. But nobody called it a turnover because we all knew that one of his teammates should’ve been there to catch the pass. We loved him.
    “Hey, Julius,” Adrian yelled from the porch. “You ain’t shit.”
    Julius and his friends laughed, flipped us off, and shook their tail feathers a little as they kept walking down the road. They all knew Julius was the best ballplayer on the reservation these days, maybe the best ever, and they knew Adrian was just confirming that fact.
    It was easier for Adrian to tease Julius because he never really played basketball. He was more detached about the whole thing. But I used to be quite a ballplayer. Maybe not as good as some, certainly not as good as Julius, but I still felt that ache in my bones, that need to be better than everyone else. It’s that need to be the best, that feeling of immortality, that drives a ballplayer. And when it disappears, for whatever reason, that ballplayer is never the same person, on or off the court.
    I know when I lost it, that edge. During my senior year in high school we made it to the state finals. I’d been playing like crazy, hitting everything. It was like throwing rocks into the ocean from a little rowboat. I couldn’t miss. Then, right before the championship game, we had our pregame meeting in the first-aid room of the college where the tournament was held every year.
    It took a while for our coach to show up so we spent the time looking at these first-aid manuals. These books had all kinds of horrible injuries. Hands and feet smashed flat in printing presses, torn apart by lawnmowers, burned and dismembered. Faces that had gone through windshields, dragged over gravel, split open by garden tools. The stuff was disgusting, but we kept looking, flipping through photograph after photograph, trading books, until we all wanted to throw up.
    While I looked at those close-ups of death and destruction, I lost it. I think everybody in that room, everybody on the team, lost that feeling of immortality. We went out and lost the championship game by twenty points. I missed every shot I took. I missed everything.
    “So,” I asked Adrian. “You think Julius will make it all the way?”
    “Maybe, maybe.”
    There’s a definite history of reservation heroes who never finish high school, who never finish basketball seasons. Hell,